The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The past 12 months have been brutal for many traditional forms of link building. Techniques that once worked are now penalized. Webmasters wonder what tactic will fall under the hatchet next - infographics, guest post blogging, or something else?

Never fear! In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we discuss how to future-proof your links from penalties and, at the same time, deliver higher rewards - no matter what tactic you use. Be sure to check out the supplemental links included in the transcription below!

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard here at the world famous SEOmoz studios. Today we're going to be talking about building high reward, future proof links.

There's a lot of comments and discussion in the SEO world today about what link strategies work and don't work. I want to kind of shift the focus away from what works now, because Google keeps changing what works now. I want to shift the focus into what Google is rewarding, to get the most bang for our buck from the links that we're building.

The last year has been really, really brutal for links. It used to be, prior to 2012, SEOs would say, "Links can't hurt you." Google would say, "Links can't hurt you." There was no worry about negative SEO or building bad links. They may not work that well, but they wouldn't have a negative effect.

But then in the last year, in 2012, Google brought the hammer down. I made a list of different link building strategies that people have tried over the years, from good to bad, all the way from paid links and link wheels up to content marketing and user generated content and real company stuff.

In 2012, we saw Google draw a line in the sand. Pretty much after that point if you were using these unnatural, low quality types of links, for the first time, in the history of SEO, bad links could hurt you. It really confused and scared a lot of webmasters.

Google started sending out unnatural link warnings. It's kind of hard to define what an unnatural link warning is, but they generally have three characteristics. Unnatural links, the kind that Google doesn't like, are typically scalable. They can be automated somehow sometimes. They create patterns that Google can detect through their algorithms, either over-optimized anchor text or network of blogs or something like that. But they create patterns that aren't found in the wild. More often than not, they're the types of links where you, the SEO, the webmaster controls the anchor text. That's kind of a funny concept, that you're building links, you're putting links out there on other people's sites, but yet you're the one that controls the anchor text. That's a pretty defining characteristic of what Google would call an unnatural link.

The high reward link on the other hand, the kind that Google seems to reward with higher rankings, better indexing and crawling are links that aren't easy to scale. You can't just pop them into a crawler and scale them out throughout the web or pay somebody to build them for you. There are very few patterns that Google can detect, and more often than not you don't control the anchor text, which is a completely more natural state if you think about it. If people are linking to you, if it's an editorial type link, you probably don't have control over how people are linking to you. Those are the high reward type links that people like.

One of the hardest things that I do as an SEO, people come to me and they ask for consulting, is talking to webmasters that have been building up their site, working hard building up their family business for a year, 5 years, 10 years and doing the things that worked. Then all of a sudden the hammer is laid down and they're done. Their business has evaporated. They're laying off people. They don't know what to do, and they have to start over. Their income is up. That is so hard.

We know from Google statements, from watching Google over the past year, that this line is moving. The threshold for unnatural links keeps getting broader as Google gets better and better at finding these patterns and rooting out these unnatural links. So, as SEOs, we need to stop asking what works now and think about high reward links, because if you're just working on what works now, this line is going to keep jumping, and we're going to be left on the other side of that line.

Now some of these tactics on the border, a lot of people are asking, "Well, what about infographics? I hear those are going to be next? What about guest blogging? I hear that's going away. Or press releases, are those working?"

Well, let me share some startling news with you. It's already happened. It's already happened. Now, I know what you're saying. You're saying, "Cyrus, wait, people are using infographics. They're ranking for it. I'm using guest blogging, and it's working for me." Yes, of course, these tactics do work. But the problem is a lot of people are using these techniques the unnatural way. We see this all the time, people spammy guest blogging with those unnatural author profile links or infographics with all the exact same anchor text over 100 blogs, and they aren't ranking for their terms. But the people who are doing it the right way, using these on the border techniques the natural way, those are going to work every time. They're not only going to work every time, but they're high reward, and Google is going to continually encourage this sort of behavior.

But as an SEO, as a webmaster, how do we know if our technique is working or not? Well, Google doesn't care about the type of link building you do. They care about the implementation. So it's never a matter of comment spam, because you can make comments on blogs. That doesn't make it spam. But when you scale it, when you create patterns, when you use unnatural anchor text, it's the implementation that matters and not the method itself.

There is one rule. I call it the golden rule. How do you know if you're building high reward links or unnatural links? 80% of the time, the golden rule, you want to pursue links where you do not have control over the anchor text. If you stick to that strategy, 80% to 90% of the time, you're going to be building links that are high reward, not just what works, because what works may help you a little bit, but high reward links. Not all links are created equal. Different links help you in rankings much more than certain types of links. So we want to focus our link building here, pursuing links where you don't control the anchor text.

Now a link builder that I really admire, Eric Ward, he's been building links ever since this industry started, 10 year career. He's one of the most sought after link builders in this industry. I'll link to him in the post below. He has never been affected by any of this, and he has never had to ask for links removed. How has he done it? When he builds links, he has never once asked for anchor text. Never. He can ask for a link, but he never demands the anchor text. When he stared doing this years ago, that was unheard of. It has rewarded him today, and all of his links have been in this zone. His clients are very happy. He used to have a newsletter. I think if he still does I think it is well worth subscribing to.

The cool thing about this strategy is, though, you don't have to give up any of your techniques. You can still use the same techniques you're using, and it applies to any method of link building that you want.

I brought up some examples right here. So you're doing infographics. You don't have to give up doing infographics. You can turn these links, which are potentially unnatural, into high value links. The old way of infographic links was you put the widget in. It had the exact match anchor text, and it got spread out to a 100 blogs. But that can trigger Penguin penalties, over-optimization.

So the smart way of doing it and the way I would recommend now, if you want to be more clever about it, is you rotate the anchor text. Mike King, of iAcquire, wrote a great post a few weeks ago about how to rotate anchor text in WordPress, and there's a WordPress plugin. Sorry, the plugin is for WordPress. Mike King wrote about different implementations. I will link to that in the post below too.

If you really want to future proof your links, keep it in this natural zone. Even rotating anchors can create some patterns. So if you really want to future proof your links, the way you do it is you just simply ask for attribution. You don't use a widget or a text box. You just simply give the file to someone and say, "Here download this, link to us, and please give us attribution." Or use Google's reverse image search to find who's already posting your infographic and reach out to them and ask for the link. That way the anchor text becomes natural, and you don't control it anymore. So high value anchors.

Press releases have gotten a lot of bad rap lately. Matt Cutts saying that press release links don't add a lot of value, because people abused them and people spammed them. You would have exact match anchor text in those press releases going out to dozens of low quality sites. Wham, you're not going to rank for that phrase.

The smart way to do it now is in your anchor text, in the press release, you just use your URL – Example.com, SEOmoz.org – or you use something branded – SEOmoz. The smart way to do it, the high value way is you're not using the press release for links at all. That's what press releases were intended for. Use your press releases to draw attention to some linkable asset on your site, not the press release itself. Then the press release goes out to hundreds of journalists. Hopefully, if your linkable asset is strong enough, say a new tool or a company announcement or stats or a report that you put out, then all these journalists and news organizations start linking to your work. So it's not the press release you want links from, it's your linkable asset. If you don't have a linkable asset, now is the time to start working on one because they earn more links than anything else.

Guest posting is a huge topic. A lot of SEOs are recommending it as one of the number one tactics for 2013 as a way to build links. But guest posting can also get you in trouble. The old way of doing it, you have this over-optimized anchor text in that author profile box. If you look at the type of links targeted by Penguin, targeted by over-optimization penalties, those over-optimized text links get you in trouble. If your text link is "Dental Hygienist Dallas" over and over and over again, across hundreds of blogs, that's going to get you in trouble.

The smart way to do it . . . Kate Morris wrote an excellent post last week about how to format these links and guest post. Basically, you don't want to use exact match, money keywords for your anchor text if you're going to be repeating them over and over and over again. But the really smart way to do it is sort of like the press release, a natural anchor text in the middle of the guest post, that links to your linkable asset. Say you publish a report or you have a new tool or you have an infographic, this is what you should be linking to. If you don't have that, you should create that first before you write your guest post. Don't just link to your blog, to your company website. Create something on your company website that is valuable that is related to your guest post that you want.

Finally outreach, general old writing emails asking for links. I learned a lot about this from Rand Fishkin, who is not here today. Rand doesn't ask for a lot of links, but he's a very clever link builder. In the old days, people would write outreach letters, and they would just ask for anchor text. "Could you please link to me, and do it this way?"

Today the smart way is you might influence the anchor text. "Hey, check out my blog about SEO tactics," and you'd link to SEO tactics hoping that they would link to it the same way.

The really smart way of doing outreach in a natural, not controlling anchor text sort of way, is simply don't ask for a link. Ask for a share instead. When you write an email, say, "Hey, we have this great resource. We want to get the word out. Would you share it with your audience?" If they're going to, six times out of ten they'll actually put it on their blog or their website, and you'll get the link anyway, with that natural anchor text. The other times they'll share it with their social network on Twitter or Facebook, exposing it to thousands of people, and potentially getting many, many more of these natural anchor texts than you would have received otherwise.

Going forward, you have a choice. You can ride this line and do what works today and risk continually getting bombed and overtaken by Google's algorithms. But really I want to encourage us to go for the high value, high reward links for higher rankings, safe SEO so we're happy, wealthy, and sunny."

I posted a comment, but it's being reviewed due to me posting links in it.. So whilst i wait on that 1 i thought i'd quickly post back to you :)Just a quick 1, for local businesses/companies - What are your thoughts on Directories?I know most of them will give you a nofollow link but in terms for a marketing campaign & Real Company Stuff points this out -Having your company in all the top and maybe not even the top directories is a must (for me anyways) as it's breaching out to 100s of potential clients who aren't going to be using Google Maps/Places but the free business indexes, or even Printed (For example, post a listing Online with Yell and you get a small printed 1, that's gained me 2-3 clients over the last 2 years alone and took me 10 minutes to setup and cost NOTHING).So i was wondering if you had any tips or your own experiences with Directories and why/why not to use them? Thanks- Charlie

Using directories for actual inbound marketing = awesome! (the way they were intended to be used)

In fact, you can use that as a rough guide to judge the SEO value of the directory. The more referral traffic the directory is likely to generate for you, the more value the directory likely passes in the eyes of search engines as well (as opposed to low quality directories that accept anyone)

Most SEOs, including myself, believe the link value from directories has diminished significantly in the past couple of years. And the lower-quality directories can actually be damaging to a link profile.

I agree that directories lost their link value. Many of them became overstuffed with links in recent years (even strong directories like DMOZ). I also believe that some directories accept low quality websites.Directories can help with driving traffic to your website, but if you have to pay for inclusion, it's probably not worth that money.

I get some mixed signals on directories. I see some competitors own markets on directories alone but so many are being removed from the index. I'm sure value is down but it seems like some directories still have great value.

I would like to ask you one question regarding the same. How to get back on search engine results after these updates from Google???

I know there is plenty of articles already, but still no improvements in ranking almost after 4-5 months of that updates. All we are doing is ethical optimization for that website. Creating natural link building, redesigned our website with new quality content, better social media and branding.... But still result not in TOP 100 which were on first page few month ago. :)

Ketan, I know this can be really frustrating. I worked with a client recently that took 8 months to recover after a massive link cleanup and new link building effort.

This is probably beyond the scope of this discussion and likely better suited for another blog post. I can say that in dozens cases I've looked at in the past 10 months, it usually boils down to one of two problems:80% - Too many unnatural links/lack of editorial links20% - On-site problems (duplicate/thin content/crawling errors, etc)These majority of these cases almost always involve a complete link cleanup, multiple reconsideration requests and sometimes smart use of the disavow tool.

Want to find out if your site has suspicious links in 10 seconds? Try the link predictor at Remove'em. It's only an estimate, but if you get 100s or 1000's of results coming back, you might want to take a deeper look.

Cyrus,Thanks for the helpful post. The resources for link building that you comment are incredible helpful. I know link earning should be the new law, however, for small B2B companies with a specific offering and niche industry, its hard to engage in link earning techniques. Smart link building like the one you comment gives us an idea on how to start link earning techniques.BTW I would love a WBF about RCS exclusively.Thanks, Regards

Hey Cyrus nice to see you again. But problem is how we can
deal with the small business which doesn’t understand the importance of RCS.
They think online and offline business are two different entities. The problem
is small companies don’t have budget to do RCS. So they move towards borderline techniques
instead of strategies. I personally in
favor of my all-time favorite quote to remain save for Google update. “Instead
of pretending natural you have to be natural”.

Your Golden role will surely help but you are moving around anchor text, what about other ranking signals?

I feel your pain! It's difficult to convince inexperienced clients to invest in high value, future-proof link building - especially when they are spammed everyday with emails promising top 10 rankings for $49/month.

The 2 biggest mistake I see most new marketers make are:

Not creating any unique assets.

Scaling the wrong thing.

You only have to create 1 unique, valuable thing. Once you convince the
client to do that, you can leverage that asset to build more links than
you thought possible.

The tempting thing to do is to scale the links, when what you really want to so is scale the creation of useful content, and then the distribution.

Good advice Cyrus as Asif does make a valid point when it comes to clients understanding the importance of investing in that quality piece once. It's one thing to convince the SEO's of the world, but customers are an entirely different beast. Great presentation though!

As my thinking that offline or online business are same if you want to get success in online business you have to work like offline but only and only method is changed. In offline you have to do it on physical way or something like that and in online you have to do it with creating links, getting audience etc, But the work is same.

In online business success seo process involved, by working on seo naturally is a good way to get success on your business.

Good morning, Cyrus. Great white board Friday. I really love your idea of creating a linkable asset. I need to think about how I can create that for my site and be useful...either for people in my industry or perhaps even for the real estate industry. Love it, love it, love it. Now, I just have to figure out what it is. (thanks for the homework assignment LOL).

It does seem, that overall link diversity (type of links...(provided they are good) and anchor text) is the way to go. I'm also guessing that it's okay to have a bunch of links that all of have the same anchor text IF they are the name of your site. Is that right? It seems to me that would be natural as that's how many sites and directories link to me when I do not control the anchor text.

I wish I could give you a definite answer to this, but unfortunately it's hard to interpret the signals in the seemingly inconsistent way Google filters results thru Penguin, over-optimization filters and even the Exact Match Domain update.

My guess - and this is pure speculation! - is that there is a difference between highly commercial business names (Top Pet Store, Houston Auto Insurance) and more non-commercial branded names, such as Westchester Flooring :) The less commercial business names appear safer.

Regardless, it's best to not over-do any linking strategy. Sounds like you're on the right path.

That makes sense. Oh and I should probably change my name on here...this is from a couple of years ago. My new site is TheFlooringGirl.com...and that's literally what people call me. Lots of people link to me that way.

When I leave some comments on blog posts, I do try to mix the name up a bit. Sometimes it's The flooring Girl, other times it's Debbie Gartner the Flooring Girl, other times it's The Flooring Girl of Westchester. I try not to be spammy by leaving just key words as I heard that really annoys people so I stopped that a year or two ago. I don't do a ton of blog commenting. I figured a few each month might suffice.

Are you remembering WBF by Rand about Earning
links instead of building. why you trying to manipulate anchor text. When people
linkout to you naturally you automatically got variation in anchor text but if
you really try to build links just follow the Cyrus steps and stay safe.

I've always thought this was the way SEO SHOULD Work. When I got into seo i was surprised that linking with the term you want to rank for was EVER a signal for google as it seems like such an unnatural process. In a way its good Google are catching up to the natural linking patterns, its just a shame that so much of it worked in the past and set bad trends on otherwise legitimate websites.

Cyrus, what a pleasure to have you back on SEOmoz' WBF.I really appreciate your calm tightened way of explaning things combined with real live examples which are all the time very valuable.I hope to see you more often here on the blog.

Great video. The way I use inforgraphics is simply for social traffic. If you can create an infographic that takes off within a particular niche then you'll get a flow of traffic to your site from the demographic you're going after. It's not just about Google anymore. I think if SEOs create a well-rounded strategy for driving traffic to their site, they will experience a lot of positive cross-overs in all the different areas for their efforts.

"You won't come back. Start over on a new domain. No one recovers from Penguin unless they're a big brand."I hope that's not true. Assuming link profile are cleaned up, I would hope most of the losses can be overcome.Maybe wishful thinking.

I've worked with a number of small and medium sites (not big brands) that made Penguin recoveries.

That said, some sites are so deep in bad links they may find there's nothing left to save. For these sites, it's tough, I'm not going to lie. But if there is something worth saving, in my experience it's worth the effort.

Great Video specially at 9.30 ! But what about Internal Links ? Google is making changing things all the way, specially about the horror New Google Image Seach what is a true problem for publisher these days. Anyway I hope not that Google will see Internal Links as spammy or over the top.

High quality stuff here. I've been preaching this for a while now. The issue I run into now is re-educating those clients that have been taught (sometimes by well intentioned SEO's) outdated and overdone SEO tactics.

Amazing video!!! This video should be part of everyone's SEO Bible. I enjoyed every bit of this WBF and it does encourage me to think of the future. I was a bit scared when you drew the line over infographics because it's something me and my co-workers recently started working with but what you said afterwards made total sense "turn unnatural links into potential high value links". 2013 is the link earning year. No doubt about it.

Cyrus. As just about every else has added your WBF is excellent! We are a Canadian web consultancy. We use various link and ranking monitoring tools and it appears that there is a 'delay' and/or significant differences regarding the impact on Google Penguin and Panda updates for Google.ca and Canadian sites vs. those reported by our American colleagues.Do you have any feedback on if Google's algorithms differ by country? ... and if the latest Google algorithm updates are rolled out internationally, or are there actual differences dependent on country.

Great WBF Cyrus. In good timing too, I was just about to send out a press release for a client, going to do a few tweaks now. On a side note, why does speechpad insist on having the anchor text Video Transcription on every WBF, wouldn't they want to change it up?

Awesome vid Cyrus! Lots of people are saying guest blogging is dead. Well they might as well say comment posting is prohibited. You voiced out a very good point. Google is not complicating things - they're just making things even more fair to us SEOs so that they can serve up the best results in their SERPs. They're the #1 SE for a reason.

Every single time I am implementing a strategy for the purpose of getting a link I ask myself, "when a human being sees what I have added to the web because I want this link, will it provide them with some sort a value?" If the answer is yes, I never hesitate for a second in pursing that link. Furthermore, if the answer is yes, I am almost never in control of the anchor text, and sometimes I'm not even in control of the page being linked to! I have only been in the SEO world for a little over a year, but it seems to me like a lot of the vets cannot let go of the need to chase anchor text, and links to specific pages. Please, for all of our sakes, let it go; it's just not necessary now, and more importantly, it will never be necessary again.Good stuff Cyrus!

Eventually, after enough repetition of beating it into people's skulls, I think the industry as a whole will finally catch on to the idea that they should be focused on helping their clients figure out how to build a better product and make people aware of it, as opposed to how they can trick people into buying their lower quality product. Kinda simple when it gets right down to it. ;-)

If there's one takeaway to be had from this great WBF, I hope it's this one.

I think we've seen an influx in the Q&A forums and in general about many of the things that Cyrus has mentioned in this WBF - about how people have heard "infographics are getting slapped" "guest posting is losing its effect". It shows the influence of Penguin is still at large, but blanket statements have never been applicable in SEO.

If things are done properly and to the best it could be then the link will reflect that, no matter what kind if it's a guest post, infographic or even blog comment. If it's done in a crap way, again the link will reflect that. While that mantra can be applied to most things in SEO, it certainly doesn't mean that all links in a category will be penalised.

Loved the WBF Cyrus and I'll certainly be subbing to Eric Ward's newsletter, so thank you for the recommendation.

I have watched it twice already and sent this to a few friends... absolutely cracking video... Its a conversation I had with a few exhibitors just on wednesday about the direction link building was going.. I am going to email them this video as well.The sound was a little crazy in the video but well done

CyrusI found its an effective post, i also have some points. As I
am observing since last Google Updates, the links from authorized websites
matters but the most important thing is that Google also consider you as an
authorized individual. If you are active on some authorized websites and backlinks
is coming from you profile then it will be the most effective backlinks.

Really good presentation and it all point back to the google webmaster guide, create unique and valuable content, don't write for google but write for the readers, i've been doing that on my site for last 3 years and now the site is getting more and more popular.

I think any sort of scalable links should be 100% natural! I also think it's important to get some keyword rich anchor text links. I don't think you should be going out of your way to request such keywords as anchor text in masses. However if you could get ONE or TWO high ranking links requested from a friend on their blog or website, why would you not rather have them as keyword rich? I think the major key is diversity which is what the natural style provides. I favor a more controlled chaos so to speak. Implementing a few good strategic links into the mix.

Great Whiteboard Friday!BUT, you missed a lot of key factors, for example - Social Bookmarking, Social Networks, RSS feeds, Pinging, Indexing etc...I personally think link building has completely changed! Most of my projects aren't built around external link building and people need to stop focusing heavily on this, but instead.. Internal link building, if you have articles on your site with your anchor text in.. Why not link it to another page that your trying to rank?- And, why is it that people keep so heavily focusing on the damn Index/Homepage? If i look on Google for my agencies search keywords, all the top 1s are Homepages, but they aren't ranking for the other 30-40 Keywords that we are, but not on the index page.. In sub-folders / sub-pages, for example we have - http://www.bootcampmedia.co.uk/services/web-design/ - indexing for Web Design Birmingham - which the top of that is 1 of our Competitors, who then aren't ranking for "Online Marketing Birmingham" - Whereas we are but instead of the same page/homepage etc we link for - http://www.bootcampmedia.co.uk/services/online-marketing/I find it almost absurd that people focus heavily on link building for their homepage, instead of individual pages.. You may rank for 1 keyword because you've link built, content written etc.. all for that 1 keyword on the Homepage but your then missing out on a HUGE amount of visits/money for the other 30 keywords that your not ranking for.

Hi Cyrus,I totally agree with you. Using any anchor tactics will get you into trouble sooner or later. Any link strategy which may been recognized by any pattern is not good strategy. Definitely I'll follow tips from this video in my current and future projects.

Great WBF Cyrus, it has been a while :) I really like your time line and where you draw the line. I totally agree with you in all points. As the "more natural" way of link building goes up, the harder it get's to really make it work, specially for small businesses (as mentioned above) RCS is definitely the one that we all as SEO's should be working at. I am just wondering why did we have 2 posts on link building out of the blue?, it hasn't happened for quite some time now. Is there anything "going on"? weather reports?

Wow this is incredibly timely for us. We've been completely rethinking our link building approach. In our case, we run a small eCommerce site. We always try to take the products and create completely new product descriptions. We even create our own videos where we demonstrate the product, how it works, etc. The challenge for us has been finding ways to safely distribute or disseminate this this 'unique' content without using unsafe methods.

Hi Cyrus, saw your white board Friday after a long time and it’s
really valuable for all internet marketers. It’s really difficult to analyze
that the links you are building is safe for you or not. As everybody knows that
natural links works well. But for me all those old methods of link building
still works as long as you are diversifying your anchor text and are not using
same anchor text over and over.

This is something I really wish we had better data on. There's a perception among SEOs I talk to that over-optimizing your internal anchor text is a good way to kill your rankings for specific keywords.

Fantastic awesome WBF. This clears up a lot of the misconceptions about link building and "what still works." It's still unbelievable that Google hits links with an "over-optimization penalty" for having relevant anchor text, the exact opposite of everything I learned about SEO years ago.

I understand that I shouldn't have repetitive anchor text on external websites that I don't own and control. But I'm wondering if the "over-optimization penalty" applies to internal links on my own website. In other words, do I need to vary anchor text on links between the pages of my website?

Hi Cyrus,Way to pull the random anchor text comment out of thin air "Dental Hygienist Dallas". ha. I feel someone new walking into the SEO world would have a better chance of succeeding since they were not as privy to how effective some of the shady tactics where in the past. I find creating something so valuable for my own site very difficult. ( I own a boutique website design company) I can not imagine how hard, costly, and expensive it would be for a company to do it for a client. Especially if they were previously charging then anything less then $1000 per month. At this point, I actually turn down SEO clients and for most companies who require local SEO I point them to tactics and resources (like SEOMoz) that they can do themselves. I try to help them understand that no one is going to market their small local business better then they can.

Very well put. Link building (or link earning) is truly only efficient, if it is natural.Most often it doesn't require extra work, but simply more clever tactics! Thank you for clarifying link building 2013+!

I developed another take on Mike King's anchor text rotation script for infographics (I actually didn't read his post when I created this). Instead of just rotating anchor text, you prompt people to create their own anchor text when they copy it from the embed code box. If they choose not to create their own anchor text, it rotates between some options you provide. See my post: Infographic Embed Codes: Get Natural Link Text With JavaScript for SEO

The point is Google is catching up manipulators one by one and now its time to rethink.Do good.Make some value for users in your post.What ever method you use you need to make sure your link is good by all standards.

It's a great post. I like the update that Google is doing. Google is making the black hat is increasingly difficult to implement. Working for natural linking policy path to follow. The white hat SEO will never be affected by these updates.

Your post about building good quality links is spot on. It takes patience and time but you will get there. Look forward to your new blog posts about link building and what techniques to use to get tremendous amount of natural links back to your blog.

I was able to learn a lot of SEO-related facts and information on your video. I highly recommend this video to anyone who wants to ensure that their SEO tactics in blogs, forums, and other websites. I enjoyed every bit of this WBF and it made me think more effective ways I could use today and in the future. Your suggestion on making a linkable asset is really good. I really want to make this work for my site.

Hi Cyrus! I just love this episode of Whiteboard Friday. I do believe that people are using infographics and others are using guest blogging to rank. These tactics really do work. But what I have noticed today, a lot of people are using these techniques the unnatural way. We see this all the time, people spammy guest blogging with those unnatural author profile links or infographics with all the exact same anchor text over hundreds of blogs, and they aren't ranking for their terms.

Links from content area on high value websites are most promising for present as well as future. And you need serious hard work to get that. Like it's said, hard work has no substitute. Maybe google wants exactly that.

Hello Cyrus,It is really a great video. I like it but there is a lot of Pain when some of the sites are not getting caught by Google. After working for around 500 sites ( gambling niche ) for my clients in last 6 months , there are some panic area I do not find any answer in any forum. some of them :1) We tried link building as per recent changes.2) We have top quality contents.3) We have good exposure in Social Media.4) Link Building is steady and slow.

We ranked #1,2,3 for 70 Keywords out of 1900 keywords but the search volume was not high.For high volume keywords, we were able to hit Top 20 and Top 30 and so on.We tried to see their competitors strategy and here is what we have found in at least 20 websites :1) Obtaining contextual links from PR >2 Blogs which look like blog network.2) All the websites having a mix of gambling and porn.3) Most of the sites were expired domain.4) All links were Dofollow.5) Exact match keyword in the context and no keyword contains brand or keyword rotation.6) No social Media stuff.7) Hosted on Shared IP and many sites hosted on same IP.8) Many a times no Relevant site.9) Too many sidebar , footer links.Still they hold Top Ranking in Google and I am watching them since last 3 months. I know it is kinda same for many SEO Companies and Google is acting as Fisherman and I know sooner and later those sites will be caught .I want to know what do you think about the same ?

It is an interesting topic to dig further. Whenever we are creating a linkable link,it is always to pay close the word 'relevancy'. As long as we stay close to relevant words or phrase,we can be sure that we are on our way to building quality links for our site.

Good Read, Cyrus!We recently got hit by Penguin - devalued from #1 to #6-15 for a some of our most important keywords. Purely because of a skewed (read unnatural) Anchor Text profile. Fortunately, we have access a good amount of these anchor links (from websites that we have built) so we are able to repair the ones we have control over. We are simply creating anchor links to our brand, or to our domain (the ones that we control) and following some of the strategies discussed by Cyrus and Rand...We are starting to see an ever-so-slow improvement.Will we ever see top 3 rank again on Google, or are we permanently "devalued"?

The problem is once you clean up your bad links, you won't necessarily come back unless you have the stronger links to balance out your profile, so it's important to continue building high value links using the methods discussed in this post.

Cyrus, have you ever taken your own advice on this? Not discrediting you, just curious.

The best entrepreneurs don't hammer away at failed ideas. They create new ones. If you were hit by penguin you need to accept your failure and start over. That is the only path to recovery - in my humble opinion.

Hey CyrusThanks for the great insight you have provided over here...I do have one question in regard to your this post - Does this process help us get through Google Penguin Update? Are there any chances of getting into Google Penguin Penalty using the process explained by you?Waiting for your kin thoughts.Thanks

Very nice presentation has been done by you. As you told us Rand is not present in this Friday, but you did fabulous job at the absence of Rand. Always keep regular whiteboard Friday without break, because of so many peoples are waiting for the each and every week for the White board Friday session.

Here you told us about the future proof link building tactics, whatever nature of business is might be telecom software outsourcing or health care development or any thing else. Always we have to go for the natural link strategy this thing has been explained by you. safe and secure link building strategy can only safe us at the SERPs.

Cyrus, thanks for the great vid; I'm digging your enthusiasm. We were just having a discussion about the value of press releases with our PR team earlier this week, and I urged them to worry less about optimizing the links within each release and focus more on rolling out the kind of content that news organizations want to carry. Instead of announcing each time we sell a widget, roll up quarterly data about our widget sales in their geographic area and we will probably get more and better links for just being patient.

Hi Cyrus, great video! thanks.One interesting point that is not touched at and it will be great to get your view on is how do you tackle exact terms for your business without actually using anchor text for those phrases (i.e. "Future-Proof Link Building")?

In other words, when following the "Future-Proof Link Building" you are actually leaving it to "faith" (Google) to detainment for what phrase it will prioritize you over your competition as you are allowing other people to "anchor" phrases for you. How would you handle it when using your "Assets".

Regarding Press Releases tertiary link potential and general press coverage, I find that many journalists (at least in Australia at the authoritative outlets) have strict editorial guidelines to not link out. It's incredibly frustrating trying to explain that actually by linking out they will, overall, get more traffic but the guidelines are guidelines. There are of course other benefits past having a link (general promotion of brand etc) which could result in a link, but a link from a highly authoritative news outlet still remains more desirable.

Your post has a lot of sense, But i need to know one thing, If someone use brand name in author bio section as a anchor text will this hurt and he use this bio anchor text in several blogs?How news reporter will link our product in the news without any product link in the PR?Here I like to share one thing, From the mid of last month I analyze this some of my highly business keywords are rank by those who never link anchor text except internal links and they are using at-least 5 time exact keyword in the page content.

Cyrus, great to see you again! The 'natural link building' tactics you reference are defiantly the way to do it, but it takes much longer to see results. I have implemented a system that combines several 'current tactics' as well as some longer term strategies to get a sweet mix of link medias.

My site suffered as well because of Penguin and the new algorithms, but with the method you are talking about i also feel there is limited control over the message and the phrases others will associate your site with.

I could imagine having to write reverse requests like, "Please do not post our link connected to the anchor text Jobs in ___, or do not post the link at all". In a way I think this is quite unfair because we really can't control what the people who link to us associate us with.